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Story Highlights

Deaths involving powerful painkillers and other opioids declined over two years in Ventura County but still outpaced the opioid overdose mortality rate across California by nearly 50 percent in 2014, according to data from several state agencies.

The numbers, displayed on a website unveiled this month, also show prescriptions for opioids and emergency room visits for a drug category that ranges from prescription oxycodone to morphine occurred at a higher rate in Ventura County than across California.

Hospitalizations related to opioids broke the trend. They not only fell 37 percent over three years in Ventura County but also dipped below statewide rates in 2014.

The numbers probe California's role in a national epidemic of addiction to drugs primarily designed to control pain.

Ventura County experts offered no definitive explanations for why some categories of opioid abuse appear intensified in the county. They speculated about the availability of drugs, users who obtain prescription drugs across county lines, recidivism among recovering addicts and the difficulty in tracking opioid use with data and comparing county numbers to state ones.

No one questioned the magnitude of the abuse.

"With the gains we've made and successes we've made, I still think it's a huge problem," said Ventura County Undersheriff Gary Pentis, citing internet drug sales and opioids that come from China and Mexico. "There are all different ways it's coming into the system."

The numbers come from the California Department of Public Health, the California Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development, and a statewide prescription drug database called CURES. A coalition that includes the California Health Care Foundation posted the data on an interactive website.

Across California, nearly 5 of 100,000 residents died after overdosing on opioids in 2014, according to the data. In Ventura County, that number was 7.34. In 2012, it was 10.75.

The tragedy is that most of the deaths are accidental, said Patrick Zarate, division manager for alcohol and drug programs at Ventura County Behavioral Health. He cited county statistics suggesting heroin and other opiates played a role in 85 deaths in 2014 and 93 a year earlier.

Contending that data rises and falls from year to year, he said Ventura County's problem is little, if any, different from the painkiller epidemic being reported across the nation.

"It's an outrage we have so many people who become addicted to a substance and have accidentally expired by using that substance," he said.

“Some of that dope is getting to our streets and being sold on our streets.”

Ventura County Undersheriff Gary Pentis on opioids prescribed in L.A. County

Pentis expressed wariness of data because of differences in how counties tally opioid in deaths or emergency room visits where multiple drugs were used. He said one of Ventura County's current problems is painkillers prescribed by doctors in Los Angeles County.

"Some of that dope is getting to our streets and being sold on our streets," Pentis said.

The statistics sound several alarms about a rise in drug use that some observers trace back to a reliance on pharmaceuticals in treating pain that grew in the 1990s.

That reliance shows in the massive number of opioid prescriptions being written. According to the new data, more than 679 opioid prescriptions were written for every 1,000 Ventura County residents in 2015. Statewide, the rate is 619 prescriptions for every 1,000 Californians.

Both the state and the local rates rose in the past two years. The numbers mean the obvious: People want the drugs.

While prescriptions are up, deaths, ER visits and hospitalizations are all trending down in Ventura County, although some of the numbers still exceed state levels. Officials credit strides to policies banning the prescription of some opioids, including OxyContin, in emergency rooms across the county; opioid task forces; and awareness of "doctor shopping," in which users obtain prescriptions from multiple physicians.

"It's not just medical doctors. We've found dentists that are being shopped," said Pentis, referring to a person who allegedly obtained Vicodin from five different dentists.

The CURES database allows doctors to track whether patients have obtained prescriptions and is billed as a way to eliminate doctor shopping.

'Until CURES becomes more widespread ... I think the opioid epidemic will continue to be an issue," said Dr. Carlo Reyes, assistant director of emergency medicine at Los Robles Hospital & Medical Center in Thousand Oaks.

Reyes cited statistics showing a higher level of use of buprenorphine, a drug used in recovery programs, in Ventura County. It may show a higher number of recovering addicts, which could be linked to elevated opioid problems.

"When you're treating addiction, there is a certain level of recidivism," he said.

The data pinpoints opioid problems by ZIP code, but many of the findings are unreliable because not enough incidents have occurred. In opioid-involved deaths, the 93036 ZIP code in the Oxnard area is identified high on the list, with enough cases in 2013 to be marked as statistically valid. In 2014 emergency room visits, the 93001 area of Ventura and the 93030 region of Oxnard rank high.

Pentis focused on the more suburban areas of east Ventura County, citing struggles to control heroin use. That, too, is linked to prescription painkillers, he said.

"I think it has been born of prescription drug abuse," he said. "I think the economics of it take people away from the pills to the much cheaper tar heroin."